Tag: Tanzania

Neema Crafts gives Tanzania’s disabled population a hand up.

All of the profits made from Neema Crafts’ UK products go to its housing project in Tanzania and you can pick them up from The Big Issue Shop.

In just 15 years Neema Crafts has helped 120 people with disabilities find their way off the streets.

Founded in 2003, the Neema Crafts Centre was part of the Anglican Diocese of Ruaha project in Iringa, Tanzania, a country where around 10 per cent of the population are classified as having disabilities, according to the country’s 2012 census.

What started as training three young deaf boys, Josephat, David and Godfrey, to make paper from elephant dung and maize leaves to produce greetings cards has grown into a business which, since 2013, has been self-sustaining and no longer dependent on charitable donations. From its elephant dung beginnings, Neema Crafts Centre now boasts a workshop, a crafts shop, a restaurant and café and even a 10-bed guest-house – all staffed by locals with disabilities, making Neema Crafts a beacon of hope for the disabled population in the region.

How Tanzania is betting on coding to help close the gender gap in its tech sector.

Every Saturday morning Hyasinta Luhanga, 18, squeezes into a room in the Majumba Sita neighborhood near Dar es Salaam’s international airport with more than two dozen girls. They’re there to learn how to code.

Luhanga is a participant in a program by social enterprise Apps & Girls, which aims to train future female programmers, and in doing so, hopefully close the gender gap in the nation’s technology industry. Even though almost equal (pdf) numbers of women and men enroll for science and technology courses in Tanzania, the unemployment rate of women in the field is more than twice that of men, recent research by the government shows.

The Tanzanian schoolboy who is a pioneer for handwashing.

An estimated 272m school days are missed every year around the year due to diarrhoea. Goodluck, a student in rural Tanzania, is trying to tackle this in his own school and community by becoming an advocate for handwashing.

In rural Tanzania, 48 per cent of people have access to clean drinking water. In schools, there is often only one toilet for more than 200 pupils and very few have functioning handwashing facilities. Poor sanitation means children fall ill, which can be expensive for families to treat and also means they miss out on schooling. It’s a problem around the world: according to the Global Handwashing Partnership, 272m school days are missed every year due to diarrhoea.